Albion

And don't forget our local star:

from SoHO

<a href="http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html" target="_blank">http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html</a>

and from TRACE

<a href="http://vestige.lmsal.com/TRACE/" target="_blank">http://vestige.lmsal.com/TRACE/</a>

Somehow between planets and stars, the poor old Sun always seems to get left out.

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: Albion ]</p>

The Lone Ranger

[Ilia]
V'ger demands to see the Creator. You will take me to Alice now.

[/Ilia]

Oh, the horror!

repoman

While many electronics/hardware projects have become cheaper and more reliable recently Nasa has been faced with some serious setbacks.

Now of course all the space probes are one of a kind and don't beneift from mass production as of yet. The probes also have to be able to work under all the radiation in space, light and cosmic rays etc.., which must require very high quality radiation hardened components.

I remember NASA said that they were going to be "faster, cheaper, better" but is this the problem? I wonder if it is a spate of bad luck or if it is poor engineering.

For sure, though, when the newer probes have worked they work impressively well. The one around Jupiter, Galileo, is just hopping around moons on command and functioning well beyond its life span (or is it already done?)


Anyway, I remember the photos coming in back then and being totally mesmerized. My mother made sure to get the paper everytime there were Voyager pictures and cutting them out for me. Seeing all the details of Saturn's ring was the best part.

B. H. Manners

This may be kind of strange to a lot of folks here but I will share anyway.

I would like to know what the age of the oldest person living in 1957 (Sputnik), 1969 (moon landing), and whenever if ever we get to Mars and even when the day comes we find life on another world. I would like to study the year of each of the above persons birth and find out what they knew about nature,science, medicine, ect. and what their practical scientific knowledge led them to believe feasible in their near future.
I would then like to see what the science fiction of their day was like and see how close it came accuracy wise to the date of the acheivement listed above.

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: BH ]</p>

echidna

Sputnik & Apollo were both political products of the Cold War, any science was purely accidental. Freud would have been proud of the phallic symbolism associated with so much testosterone.

echidna

We’ll get to Mars when Nike decide they can use it to sell more shoes.

beausoleil

Seems to me, somebody said ISS seemed a bit dull - but you asserted

"Actually, the real scientific bread-winner has been the Hubble Space Telescope. It's more important than all of those probes and the ISS put together."

Which I disagree with. The probes return different sorts of data about different sorts of things addressing different scientific issues. There's no point comparing the science they do.

In public relations terms, the ISS is unmistakably dull so far compared to Hubble, Viking, Apollo or Galileo (for instance). Doesn't mean it isn't scientifically or technically worthwhile.

bluefugue

Interesting. Well, when we landed on the moon in 1969 I am sure there were people old enough to have read H.G. Wells' "The First Men In the Moon" when it came out (1901), or to have been aware of the Kitty Hawk flight in 1903. It still amazes me that we went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo 11 in 66 years.

Pablo Picasso was of course still alive (well into his '80s) at the time of the moon landing. When asked what he thought of it, he said something to the effect of: "It means nothing to me and I don't care."

Incidentally, now that we are living in the year 2002, it's a common refrain to say "where are the flying cars, space colonies, etc.?" But I had a funny science-fiction moment recently. While watching a tennis tournament on TV, I heard a sponsorship blurb: "Sponsored by Honda, makers of Asimo, the most advanced humanoid robot in the world." You could put that blurb in an old Isaac Asimov story and it would fit pretty well.

Valentine Pontifex

As was already mentioned Voyager II was the probe that visited Uranus and Neptune.

I might also point out that the Uranus visit was in January 1986, not 1987. The visit lost press coverage because of another space story: the loss of a space shuttle and crew.

Friar Bellows

So tell me, beausoleil, if you were in charge of dividing up public money and distributing it to the field of astronomy, how would you do it? Lots of things are scientifically worthwhile, but we only have a finite amount of money to spend on them. Wouldn't you have to make these "apples and oranges" types of comparisons that you deride above? Wouldn't you be forced to consider which projects are going to give us "the biggest scientific bang for the buck"?

With the money spent and forecast to be spent on the ISS (hundreds of billions of dollars), we could have a planetary probe around every planet in the Solar System, and space telescopes bigger and better than Hubble. And we'd still have money left over to spend on sending humans into space. I believe that the ISS is a white elephant.